Norwich registrars working to streamline voter records

If there’s a shorter wait for Norwich residents to vote this November, they can thank the city’s registrars of voters.

Adam Benson

If there’s a shorter wait for Norwich residents to vote this November, they can thank the city’s registrars of voters.

Dianne Slopak, the city’s Republican registrar of voters, has devoted much of this year overhauling an address database riddled with inconsistencies, errors and other discrepancies that have caused headaches at the polls for moderators and extended wait times for those seeking to cast a ballot.

“They’ll know it matters when they go to vote,” Slopak said. “It should make the lines go faster.”

Since January, Slopak and Dianne Daniels — her Democratic counterpart — have updated information for 6,000 of the city’s approximately 21,000 registered voters, making sure addresses are in numerical order, clearing away residencies that no longer exist and synchronizing the office’s records with weekly reports from the state Department of Motor Vehicles and other sources.

Waves of new records arrive at the office, from death notices filed through the city clerk’s office to monthly address change notices from the post office.

The modernized rolls will make their debut at precincts in this November’s election for city offices. With typically lower turnouts than there are for races for state and federal seats, officials will be looking for efficiencies to see if the revisions had an effect.

City resident Beryl Fishbone, a longtime moderator, said streamlining the information should save time for poll workers, as well.

“You really have to second guess sometimes. The checkers won’t be as frustrated,” Fishbone said.

Av Harris, a spokesman for Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, said residents can start registering to vote online in January, and a new electronic reporting system that was tried out during the May borough elections is set for wider use.

Both of those moves should alleviate Election Day complications, Harris said.

“What we do anticipate is that will make voter registration records more accurate. When everything is typed and submitted in a standard format that everybody can understand, it will cut down on those clerical errors,” he said. “But any database is only going to be as good as the information that’s inputted into it.”

Daniels hopes there will be another benefit, too: More people will come out to vote if there’s less red tape to wade through.

“Part of what I do is humanize the process,” she said. “There’s no sense complaining about anything in this city if you do not vote and aren’t registered to vote.”